"The difference is, I'm in the mood to kick a little ass"

In honor of the Winter Olympics, I give you this clip:



I have been watching some of the olympic coverage but do not usually watch as much of Winter as I do the Summer Olympics. My favorite Winter Olympics movies would be The Cutting Edge, Cool Runnings and Miracle, in case you were wondering :o)

The last week has been a little crazy. The passing of a friend's father, the East Coast being up to its eyeballs in snow and traveling to Ohio to help my best friend with wedding stuff and celebrating her completion of grad school, to name a few. I did get some movie watching in before the craziness hit and to take my mind of things, so here we go...

Forest Whitaker totally deserved the Best Actor Oscar for The Last King of Scotland. Whoa. If you did not see this movie when it came out in 2006, as I neglected to do, you must see it now. It was intense and sometimes a little too graphic for my taste, but excellent none-the-less. Whitaker usually plays such a gentle and kind man that it made him even scarier as the military dictator and President of Uganda, Idi Amin. That was definitely the last year I neglected to watch a movie that people were raving about during Oscar season.

In my continuing preparation for this year's Oscars on March 7, I watched The Hurt Locker and it was phenomenal. Another very intense movie, but still phenomenal. It is about a unit of soldiers who have one of the most dangerous jobs in the world: disarming improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq. My favorite scene is where one soldier is trying to figure out why another soldier enjoys what they do so much, when the rest of them are just trying to survive:

Sergeant JT Sanborn: I'm ready to die, James.
Staff Sergeant William James: Well, you're not gonna die out here, bro.
Sergeant JT Sanborn: Another two inches, shrapnel zings by; slices my throat- I bleed out like a pig in the sand. Nobody'll give a shit. I mean my parents- they care- but they don't count, man. Who else? I don't even have a son.
Staff Sergeant William James: Well, you're gonna have plenty of time for that, amigo.
Sergeant JT Sanborn: Naw, man. I'm done. I want a son. I want a little boy, Will. I mean, how do you do it, you know? Take the risk?
Staff Sergeant William James: I don't know. I guess I don't think about it.
Sergeant JT Sanborn: But you realize every time you suit up, every time we go out, it's life or death. You roll the dice, and you deal with it. You recognize that don't you?
Staff Sergeant William James: Yea... Yea, I do. But I don't know why.[sighs] I don't know, JT. You know why I'm that way?
Sergeant JT Sanborn: No, I don't.

I can definitely say that seeing it one time was enough, but is definitely worth seeing. At least see it so that you fully understand what our soldiers are doing for us, because it truly is amazing.

Now onto more lighter fare...

I watched the movie Class with Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy and Jacqueline Bisset. And, of course, no 80's movie would be complete without supporting roles from John Cusack and Alan Ruck :o) It was pretty good and one of those 80's movies that I felt I needed to see, but was rather predictable. I guess when you have seen as many movies as I have though, not many things surprise you anymore. However, my one question is, how is it fair that Rob Lowe looks exactly the same today as he did in 1983?! Seriously!

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen did not get very good reviews, but I saw the first one, so I thought I should watch the second one. And it was not very good. Don't watch it. For those of you who did actually see it, does anyone else think that the location of the Matrix of Leadership looked an awful lot like the place where Indiana Jones found the Holy Grail? I'm just sayin'.

I also saw Valentine's Day with my best friend on Valentine's Day and it was just as cheesy as we expected it to be. My main complaint was that there were just too many characters and too much going on to really get invested in any of the people's lives. I felt that it was trying too hard to be Love Actually, especially with the cute little boy who is in love. And, as much as I love Taylor Swift, I felt like they could have taken out both high schooler storylines and the movie would have been much better. It was cute, but you probably should not spend your money seeing it at the theater and just wait for it to come out on DVD. I probably would not have gone, but my future husband, Bradley Cooper, was in it, so of course it was a must see for me :o)

I would like to see Crazy Heart and A Single Man this week, but I will probably only get to one. I also have District 9 from Netflix. When it gets closer to the Oscars, I will give you my winner predictions.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you in the comments section below. I hope all you East Coasters survived the snow!

xoxo
c

If you want to help Haiti, here are my suggested places to donate:
Hope For Haiti Now
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance
UNICEF
Stiller Strong

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"This one... I don't even have to ask but, I will. What do you think of this one?"

I tend to go through these phases where I decide I really like an actor or actress and then I proceed to watch almost every movie they have ever been in.

I first did it with Ryan Gosling, now my favorite actor of all time. I had first seen him in Remember the Titans as the adorable Alan Bosley who loves country music. But, like what happens so often, he was a minor role and I didn't pay much attention to him. I next noticed him in the trailer for Murder by Numbers with Sandra Bullock, but I'm not a huge fan of scary movies so initially I did not see it. Then came The Notebook. I read the book first, and made my mom read it too so that she would go to the movie with me :o) It's a pretty sappy romance, but you cannot not fall in love with Noah Calhoun...especially when he is as gorgeous as Ryan Gosling :o) I then proceeded to add every movie he had ever done to my Netflix queue....

Side note: I have been a member of Netflix since the middle of my sophomore year of college (2003) and there are currently 221 movies/TV shows in my queue. I don't think it has been below 200 in several years because I just keep adding to it.

Now, aside from the random TV shows he did before Remember the Titans, I have seen every movie Ryan Gosling has ever made. Granted, that's only 10 movies, but still :o) Between Titans and the Notebook, he mostly played weird, sometimes slightly deranged characters, but he was always phenomenal. Titans, The Believer, Fracture and Lars and the Real Girl being my favorites. I liked Half Nelson, and definitely thought he deserved the Oscar nomination (I have not yet seen The Last King of Scotland, so I cannot say if he deserved to win) but it was a little too depressing for me to want to watch over and over...and over again, and that is pretty much how I determine my favorite movies. I did eventually see Murder by Numbers and it was good, as was The United States of Leland and Stay. The Slaughter Rule was just a little too weird for my taste. All of them are definitely worth seeing.

According to People.com, Ryan Gosling is now working on an album. The group is called Dead Man's Bones and I've only heard one song called "Name in Stone", but it sounds pretty good. The video is different, but I like it...

His next two movies coming out are:

All Good Things with Kirsten Dunst and Jeffrey Dean Morgan about "a detective that begins to unravel a missing-persons case that looks to spell doom -- and quite possibly death -- for the heir to a New York real estate dynasty." Not sure when it'll be released.

Blue Valentine with Michelle Williams about "a contempo married couple, charting their evolution over a span of years by cross-cutting between time periods." Out next year sometime.

I look forward to both, and many more of his movies hopefully, to come.

I do this because I feel like you cannot really say that you like or dislike an actor until you have compared his entire body of work. I definitely do not have time to do this with all actors - if i could somehow find a way to get paid to watch movies all day every day, it might be possible - but for now, I must be more picky about to whom I devote my time.

xoxo

c